Design Discourse - Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing, 2010a

Di Renzo
• Aim for results. “Rhetoric,” Bacon claimed, “applies Reason to the Imagination
to better move the Will” (238). An effective PTW curriculum will
value real-life effectiveness over textbook correctness, which is why you
must include credit-bearing internships and consultancies. Seek program
feedback, therefore, from potential employers in industry and technology,
as well as college administrators, promoters, and admissions officers. And
whether or not Bacon actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays, make this line
from Act 3, Scene 2 of Coriolanus your motto:“In such business action is
eloquence.” (79).
Staffing and Administration
“They that have the best eyes are not always the best lapidaries [jewelers]; and according
to the proverb the greatest clerks are not always the wisest men.” (105)
Sir Francis Bacon, “Advice to Fulke Greville” (1596)
• Staff courses according to experience and expertise, not seniority and advanced
degrees. This concept seems heretical but makes the best sense and
does the most justice to both students and subjects. A full- or part-time
instructor who worked for five years as a technical and promotional writer
in a county hospital is better qualified to teach medical writing than an
assistant or associate professor who graduated from RPI. Scholars can supply
practitioners with outside readings, but practitioners cannot supply
scholars with inside knowledge.
“Surely ever medicine is an innovation, and he that will not apply new remedies must
expect new evils. For time is the greatest innovator, and if time of course alter things to
the worse, and wisdom and counsel not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?”
(132)
Sir Francis Bacon, “Of Innovations” from The Essays (1625)
• Anticipate change and plan for contingencies. To keep your program open
and flexible, be prepared to alter its focus and sequencing and to amend,
combine, or jettison courses in response to market need and student demand.
On the subject of adaptability, Bacon loved to quote Machiavelli:
“If you can change your nature with times and circumstances, your fortune
will not change” (68).
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